Novel combination immunotherapy for patients with metastatic colorectal cancer

A physician-scientist at City of Hope, has identified a novel combination immunotherapy regimen that demonstrated significant response in a subgroup of people with recurrent metastatic colorectal cancer.

The study Marwan Fakih, enrolled 29 patients with chemotherapy-resistant metastatic colorectal cancer who had a biomarker known as microsatellite stable (disease). The participants received a combination immunotherapy treatment consisting of ipilimumab and nivolumab, plus the targeted therapy regorafenib. Of the 22 patients whose cancer had not yet spread to the liver, more than 50% are still alive after 20 months. The seven patients whose disease had spread to the liver also received the study treatment, but they had a less favorable outcome with a median survival of seven months.

In a previous study, Fakih had noted there was a modest benefit when treating metastatic colorectal cancer patients without liver disease with nivolumab and regorafenib. Here, he showed that adding a CTLA-4 inhibitor, ipilimumab, appears to improve the health outcome in this subgroup of patients. (In a small sample of patients with liver metastases, the addition of CTLA-4 inhibitors did not appear to lead to major clinical benefits.)

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